If you’re a real estate investor aiming to grow your portfolio without burning out or taking on unnecessary risk, this is the episode you need. I’m breaking down the three powerful types of joint venture (JV) partnerships that can help you scale smarter and faster—without going it alone. From money partners to operations experts, these collaborative strategies will show you how to delegate, share responsibilities, and create win-win structures that protect your interests and accelerate your success. Learn how to vet the right partners, structure deals that make sense, avoid common pitfalls, and stay on track with clear systems. Whether you’re new or seasoned in real estate investing, this episode is packed with practical advice you can act on immediately.
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Do you want to grow your real estate portfolio without taking on all the work or all the risk? The best investors don’t do it alone. They leverage partnerships to scale bigger, faster, and more efficiently. So welcome to episode five of six of our leverage series, where I’m breaking down the different types of leverage real estate investors can use to 10x their growth. A new episode comes out every week, so be sure to subscribe wherever you’re listening so you don’t miss the next one. So why does leverage matter?
Well, smart investors know how to collaborate, delegate and share responsibilities so they can scale without burning out. And the right JV or partnership can make the difference between being stuck and growing exponentially. So in this episode, I’m going to cover the three types of JV partnerships, how to structure win-win deals and common red flags to avoid. Let’s dive right in. So the three types of JV partnerships. First, we have a money partner.
That’s someone who brings capital to the deal, but they don’t want to do any of the work.
A money partnership is best for passive investors who want to invest, but they don’t want to have the time or the energy or the interest in finding or managing deals. So how does it work? If you’re the active investor there, you find and manage the deal and the money partner funds it and shares in the profits.
So how does this work? Well, an example would be you’ve got a busy professional who wants to invest money in real estate, but they really don’t have the time to do active real estate investing themselves. So they might invest, let’s say $100,000 into your flip, covering all of your costs, effectively being a private money lender. And in exchange, they’re going to get, let’s say 10, 12, 14% annualized return between the points up front and the interest rate you pay on the loan over time.
So that’s an example of how you could partner with a money partner. And then it might also help you to partner with an experience partner. So this is someone who’s going to bring knowledge, track record, or connections to help with your deals. This is best for newer investors who need credibility or they need some guidance and help someone to hold their hand and keep them from making some big costly mistakes.
So how it works is that you as the newer investor or the person who has the experience partner are gonna do a lot of legwork. You’re gonna do a lot of the actual work and you’re gonna check in with them. You’re gonna let them know what you’re doing and they’re gonna mentor and guide you and help structure the deal. They may give you some connections, do some introductions or things like that. So they’re pretty much an advisor and a resource that you have to help you do well. So an example may be,
that you find a 10-unit multifamily, but you don’t have any experience with multifamily, with getting financing for multifamily, with doing renovations on a multifamily, all your experiences with single-family homes. And now you’re jumping up to 10 units. You may partner with a seasoned multifamily investor who’s gonna guide you with how to do things in the multifamily space. They may connect you with their lenders for multifamily, ones they have used before. They may help you raise capital for your part of the deal,
and they might help you negotiate some better loan terms, connect you with some contractors, help you review those contractors’ estimates, anything along those lines. In exchange, they would often get a percentage of equity or some other value in the deal. And then the third type of partner I wanna talk about today is an operations partner. There’s somebody who’s going to help handle the management, the renovations, or ongoing work so you don’t have to. So this is best for investors who want the passive income without dealing with the day-to-day.
This is kind of the flip of the money partner that we talked about on the first place, right? You can have your operations partner, your money partner, they can go together. So this is the person who doesn’t have the money, but has the time to handle the operations. And how it works is that the operations partner, you’re going to find the deal, right? You’re gonna handle all the work along the way, right? You’re gonna handle the inspection, getting through that process, you’re gonna handle closing, and then you’re gonna handle
either property management or overseeing the renovations, pretty much whatever the work is, the operations part of that investment, you’re going to be in charge of it and making sure it goes as well as possible. So an example of this could be that you are…
Let me give you an example that’s a little different than partnering with a money partner. You as an operations partner could partner with a contractor and JV on a fix and flip deal. You bring in the capital, you find the deal, you do everything else and the contractor does the contracting. They are going to oversee the renovations in that part of the timeline, but you’re doing everything else. And then the profits are split 50/50 after the sale because you and the contractor are both doing that work. So that’s one way that you could partner with someone as an operations partner.
So how do we structure win-win JV agreements? And first I want to really emphasize the need of win-win. If you want to be in real estate investing long term, we really want to have a win-win abundance mindset. Someone else winning does not take away from my winning. I don’t need to have all of the cookies. I can share cookies with them too. We get people who don’t want to share in the real estate investing space sometimes, and so just want to clarify, I don’t want to take it for granted that we want this win-win,
but I think it’s what’s best in the long run and is best for being a good human. All right, let’s start with that. So how are we gonna have these win-win JVs? First, we wanna be really clear with everything upfront. Who is doing what? What exactly are the responsibilities? You wanna define that. Who finds the deals? Who handles financing? Who manages operations? Make a list of here’s everything that’s gonna be, then you’re going to say, who’s doing each piece and have it really clear. That’s one of the first things I would say. And then second,
determine the profit splits and decision-making power. With the profit splits, you wanna make sure that they’re equitable. They don’t necessarily need to be equal. They wanna be equitable, which is, we’re gonna equal it to the effort or the value that someone’s adding. And it could be the value of money. It could be the value of connections. It could be the value of experience. It could be the value of time. We wanna find a way to consider what do we think, like, what percentage of value is everyone bringing to the deal,
and how do we have a profit split that represents that so that it’s fair and a win-win. And you also wanna consider risk along with workload. Keep all that in mind. I know it sounds like a lot. I think when you get it out on paper and you start to think about what everybody is and what they’re bringing to the table, it tends to be a little easier to at least get a rough start for that. The third thing is put everything in writing. You always wanna use a legal
joint venture contract or whatever is going to apply to this specific thing. But you want a contract in place that covers the role, profit splits, exit plans. Let’s have a divorce agreement in there if things go wrong and then dispute resolution along those same lines. What are we gonna do if we disagree? How are we gonna handle that? And if anything changes with that original agreement, if you guys decide, because it’s not uncommon, it happens a lot—we started on this path
and then we kind of pivoted. Somebody decided that they didn’t have the time they thought they would, or somebody’s bringing more money to the table. Make sure you get that in writing and determine how that adjusts your original agreement. That’s really helpful as well. And then with these JV agreements, I really want you to think about planning for the unexpected. What happens if a partner wants out? What happens if the market shifts? It’s really helpful to have exit strategies in place from the beginning.
Now you’ve got this great setup, you know what you’re going to do, you’re going to start executing. How do you make sure that you stay on track? How do you make sure that everybody is on the same page throughout the process? Because that’s going to prevent a lot of issues. I would recommend that you use some KPIs and you track them on a weekly basis, bi-weekly basis, something like that, so that everything is measured with hard and fast numbers and it’s transparent. Everyone can go look at it.
So this is really important because without any sort of tracking system or transparency, miscommunication can happen and that’s gonna lead to disputes, wasted time, misunderstandings. We don’t need that. So what are some things that you could track to help? When you’ve got money for money partners, some things you wanna think about is what was your agreed upon ROI and can we track if we’re on target for that? What was the payment schedule? What was the capital deployment?
If you’re tracking the money for the money partner, we want to think about how are we going to track the money. Then for experience partners, we want to track how does the deal do. Maybe we track how we’re doing our mentorship check-ins, how often we’re doing them. If the experienced partner is going to get an amount of equity or some financial reward for it, we want to make sure that we are getting our value’s worth. So we want to say, hey, we’re going to check in
every week, we’re gonna have a call every week, or at least three weeks out of every four, or something like that. And you wanna measure that so that everybody can see. I love Monday.com as a project management portal, so I would make a Monday.com board for this, and I would be able to track, like, yes, I met with Molly the mentor weeks one, two, and three this month, we didn’t meet week four, but that’s fine. But if I’m only meeting week one with Molly the mentor, and she’s not meeting with me the rest of the month, I wanna have that tracked so I can go back to Molly and say, hey, Molly,
I either need more meetings or we need to renegotiate your split because the split we negotiated was based on this amount of meetings per month and that’s not happening. Or if you thought about it in the original contract, you would have terms. If these terms aren’t met, what is the consequence? What is the change to the split or the change to the original agreement? So that’s where we’re tracking what was expected and what was set in the contract. We can see if it’s being met or not.
And then for some operations partners, what are the property metrics? If you are managing a rehab, how are we doing on the timeline? How are we sticking to our budget? How are we doing those pieces and can we explain any variations? If you are doing property management, what does our vacancy rate look like? What is our response rate to tenants? What are those details that we can measure and put in that data so that everybody agrees if we’re doing a great, average or less than stellar job? And how do you do this?
Like I said before, I love Monday.com. I think that that’s a great place to do it. Very affordable, very robust, everything you need. You can assign tasks, you can have deadlines, you can have milestones, and you can create really cool dashboards to see it all really well. If that is way too high tech for you, start with Google Sheets. Just start with Google Sheets. Put it in there. You can do so much in Google Sheets with financials, timelines, deliverables. It’s a little more manual than Monday.com. It’s not as pretty, but it’s better than nothing. Start there, and maybe you progress to Monday.com eventually.
And then the important thing also with tracking is regular meetings. If you have watched any of my videos about working with anyone, you know the value of having preset periodic meetings is so, so helpful because things happen in meetings, even if they’re phone calls, even if they’re Zoom calls that do not happen via email or text. So maybe you have a monthly check-in, maybe you have a weekly, bi-weekly, quarterly.
You just want to have something based on your project and how quickly it’s moving and how much is at risk. What those meetings are going to be to ensure everybody’s on the same page and it really helps with just transparency in general. What are some common red flags that I see in partnerships? First, unclear roles or expectations. Where things aren’t laid out from day one, problems will happen. Mismatched commitment levels are another issue. If one partner is all in,
and the other has five million things on their plate and they could only commit like half an hour a week to this and they’re constantly procrastinating, resentment is gonna build and there’s going to be conflict. So again, we wanna set from the beginning, what is everybody’s expectation for participation from the beginning? Third, lack of legal agreements or lack of updating them as things change. Handshakes don’t cut it. You always want to use contracts to protect both sides and…
Ideally, this is a contract that is drawn up by an attorney. And if it’s drawn up by the other side, you are doing a lot of vetting of that contract. You’re having an attorney check it, something like that. Conflicting business values. This is something else that can really make it tough for a partnership. If you are flipping for quick cash, but your partner wants long-term holds, it’s not going to work out. So we want to be clear. What is your goal with this? Are we aligned? Because otherwise we’re gonna be working toward different goals.
And then another thing is not vetting partners properly. You don’t just wanna take someone’s word. You wanna check their track records. You wanna check their past partnerships. You wanna check their referrals. Like in general, with real estate investing, one of the most common issues I see with people who rent properties? They don’t call up the referrals. And that’s just for a tenant. That’s not even for somebody being a partner with you on an investing opportunity, which is
much more interactive and I’d say riskier. You want to call and speak to people who worked with this person before and find out what went well and what didn’t and what you need to know going forward. I would recommend a background check, a credit check, make sure that everything is above board.
And then what are some ways to find a great partner?
Start within your network. You may know people who are either already doing stuff in real estate investing that you need to do or that may be interested in partnering with you for some of these roles that don’t require experience. It may be a money partner, for example, or something like that. You may have a colleague, a friend, a business connection who would be a great fit. Second, go into that real estate investing space. Join investor groups, join masterminds, go to networking events or local meetups.
BiggerPockets or RIAs—these are all places where either in person or virtually you can go meet somebody who’d be a great fit for you. Third, leverage social media and content, posting about deals on your social media, posting about where you’re doing well, where you’d love to have a partner. Being open about it can attract potential partners with complementary skills, capital—whatever. You can say, here’s what I can offer you,
and here’s what I’m looking for. I mean, not like a dating site, but kind of. And then finally, working with a coach or mentor. They often have connections and can help you structure your first few partnerships correctly. They can often introduce you to a person who would be a good fit for you. They have a Rolodex, let’s say, or a contact list that they can use to help get you that right connection.
So I hope that I have walked you through how you can really partner with someone well to set up for success so that you can leverage those partnerships to go further faster. It’s so much easier when we have somebody alongside us, somebody whose skills complement our own so that we can learn from them, so that we can stay in our zone of genius in a specific project and have someone else be in theirs. I hope this was amazing and helpful for you. Be sure to like and subscribe wherever you are listening. And if this would be helpful for another investor you know, please share it with them as well.